a deep breath. ‘So, Mum, just what did happen, at uni? Why didn’t you finish, really?’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You can tell me. Did you, like, get expelled or something?’ He grinned at her.
Tell him.
Ed fiddled with a toy from a cracker. It was a miniature geometry set; he was moving the pieces around the table. When he was tiny, he used to collect all the toys from the crackers and keep them in little boxes. She’d found one this summer when she’d been clearing out his room. Tiny dice, the geometry set, key rings – all little lottery wins for a child under ten; part of his childhood in a box.
She sat up straight.
He reached toward her with a cracker. ‘Pull, Mum!’ Snap! Maddie got the hat, the pencil sharpener – result! – and a Chinese saying. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
She glanced out of the glass doors to the garden to see Greg fiddling with Taffie’s lead. Taffie was bouncing around, making it hard for Greg to attach the lead to his collar. She had no idea if there was a future with her and Greg, but she had started to think there might be. Tim was out of her life. He’d left another voicemail last night, clearly drunk on Christmas Eve, about going for counselling and how he wanted to be part of her life, how sorry he was. How he’d never meant to hurt her, that he loved her. How could he love her when he’d been sleeping with Mrs Pearl Earring behind her back?
She knew with certainty she didn’t want him in her life anymore. The person she did want in her life was slowly but surely appearing in it more and more and she could feel her real heart, one that she had kept frozen out of her life, starting to thaw. The feeling was overwhelming.
But first, she needed to explain it all to Ed. She took another gulp of wine. This wasn’t going to be easy.
‘I didn’t get expelled, no. There’s a lot I need to tell you, Ed, a lot. I was about your age when I got myself into “trouble” as my parents put it.’
Ed looked over at her and cocked his head to one side. ‘What do you mean?’
So she explained. About the pregnancy. The hurt, the panic. Running back to her parents. The day of the finals, how she couldn’t face it, that everyone would know, that they’d be talking about her. How she tried to walk into that room and hold her head up high. The anguish of running out of the hall just after the adjudicator had told them to turn their papers over. The queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. How she couldn’t stop the tears. How she’d spent the most awful summer at home. The nausea, the vomiting. It brought all the memories back as her heart raced. She started to tell him about the bleeding, about being at home, about the shame. About her mother and father. Her mother had been ill then; she had the cancer, yet nobody had diagnosed her properly. There was much less information about breast cancer then, especially the aggressive kind her mother had had.
She looked over at the flickering fairy lights on the tree as she let the enormity of it all sink in. But she still hadn’t given Ed the full picture, coloured in some parts that needed dark and light shading to make them clearer.
The room was silent, apart from the crackling of the fire. The flames were deep orange, tangerine and purple, flickering in the grate.
Eventually Ed spoke. ‘You lost the baby?’
‘I did lose a baby, Ed, but—’
She opened her eyes to see Ed had taken her hand and was staring at her, wide-mouthed. She opened her mouth to carry on the story, but he interrupted.
‘But he left you. Whoever it was. Mum, that’s awful. You must have felt so, Jesus, so alone. My God.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘I could never do that to Adity.’
‘I did feel alone, but there was a reason—’ But she didn’t finish the sentence as Ed cut in.
‘What the hell reason could there be? There is no reason for that, Mum. Are you serious? I couldn’t imagine doing anything like that to Adity. It repulses me.’
‘Ed you don’t understand. There’s more—’
‘I’m sure there’s more,’ he slurred. ‘All the stuff you went through, oh God. Adity’s mother lost a child